Alphabet’s chief executive Sundar Pichai announced Wednesday that Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind’s long‑time technology chief, will take charge of Gemini 4, the next iteration of Google’s flagship large‑language model. The move came as Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals, the two co‑technical leads of the Gemini effort, submitted their resignations on the same day.
Dean, who spent 27 years at Google, thanked colleagues in a memo before departing to launch a new venture with fellow DeepMind veteran Sanjay Ghemawat. The venture, called Discovery Loop, aims to automate the scientific discovery process by letting AI systems design, run, and evaluate experiments at scale. The startup’s founding team includes Dean, Vinyals, Le, and Ghemawat. It has already secured seed funding from Radical Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, Doerr Capital and Alphabet, though the amount and valuation remain undisclosed.
Vinyals used his X (formerly Twitter) account to announce his exit, noting that he was recruited by Dean in 2013 after a brief email exchange. He highlighted the irony of being asked to “take the next leap” by the very person who brought him to Google. The four founders say Discovery Loop will first focus on improving transformer architectures before tackling broader challenges such as drug discovery, clean water, and cybersecurity.
DeepMind leadership changes
In a separate announcement, DeepMind’s co‑founder and chief executive Demis Hassabis said he would step back from daily operations to become chair of DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet. Hassabis will retain oversight of Isomorphic Labs and continue work from the new Platform 37 office in London. Kavukcuoglu, who spent 13 years building DeepMind’s deep‑learning team and led projects such as WaveNet and DQN, will report directly to Pichai and inherit responsibility for Gemini 4.
Alphabet’s stock reacted sharply, slipping roughly 5% to $362.31 on the New York Stock Exchange. Analysts called the restructuring “seismic,” noting that it comes amid a series of Gemini model delays and the company’s first quarterly cash‑flow deficit. The market’s nervousness reflects intensifying competition from OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI firms.
Despite the turmoil, Google’s Gemini app still boasts more than 950 million monthly active users, and its companion chatbot Gemma has surpassed 900 million downloads. Pichai defended the company’s position, saying Google remains the only firm with a full‑stack AI capability—from chips and infrastructure to frontier models and consumer products.
The departures also raise questions about talent retention at DeepMind. Researchers leaving to start their own companies is a familiar pattern in the industry, but the timing—coinciding with the appointment of a new Gemini leader—has drawn particular scrutiny. Some observers view the move as a sign that Google’s internal AI pipeline is losing momentum, while others see it as an opportunity for the new startup to push the boundaries of automated research.
Discovery Loop’s website frames its mission as eliminating the bottleneck in scientific discovery: “One of humanity’s great inventions is the method of experimentation; we aim to automate the loop.” The founders plan to use their own models as the first customers, then apply the technology to the National Academy of Engineering’s Grand Challenges. Venture capital backers, including Vinod Khosla, have expressed optimism that the venture could have an impact “larger than the impact that Google had.”
As Alphabet moves forward, the success of Gemini 4 and the progress of Discovery Loop will likely become benchmarks for the company’s AI strategy. Whether the shake‑up revitalizes Google’s research engine or signals deeper strategic challenges remains to be seen.
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